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Texture Paint additions in Blender 2.5?

Eventually got Blender 2.5 to run today and wanted to see if something changed on the Texture Paint. To my disappointment all is the same and it is still lacking utterly important editing abilities. Anybody knows if they are planed to be added?

Spot painting. From sculpting we know this already. The image you use as brush is drawn centered around the point you click on the mesh. Texture Paint for some reason uses a totally stupid coordinate system locked to the window or something else nobody expects. This makes it very hard if at all to properly paint images using a brush like a stamp.

Another point missing is Brush Preview. In Sculpting if you resize the brush you see the image in a transparent way so you know how the next brush stroke might look like on the mesh. Texture Paint is missing this so it's guessing all the time what the next brush stroke is going to look like.

Another something which is missing is Anchor Painting. Again sculpting has this and Texture Painting is missing such a feature. This is very helpful to draw textures where you need good control over the result. Especially it prevents tons of undoing to get just one image right.

That's mostly all which is direly missing from the Texture Paint mode. Since sculpting has all this already it should not be difficult to add it to Texture Paint too.

The texture paint features is one of the most important features Imho, I use it ALL the time, makes life so much easier dabbling directly on the character, much more "on hands feel" than in separate maps.

There is a summer of code project that is focused on paint tools, what in particular are you missing/desiring? The first target of the project is unifying the stroke system between the various paint and stroke tools. The next target is making available more of the brush system to the paint tools.

There is a summer of code project that is focused on paint tools, what in particular are you missing/desiring? The first target of the project is unifying the stroke system between the various paint and stroke tools. The next target is making available more of the brush system to the paint tools.

The three points I outlined in my initial post. In general it boils down to add the paint features like Anchor to the texture paint as well as using a more logic coordinate system so the texture is centered around mouse-click like a real paint program brush instead of the current system which is hard to predict what happens next if you paint.

Have you used the External Edit Projection Paint tools? It's insane!!! As a result of EEPP, I for one encourage Blender devs to go drink a latte and get a massage, instead of making more texture tools.

Why bother? Photoshop is my preferred image editor hands down, yours might be GIMP or something else, but if you had to paint an illustration you probably won't be using Blender. Now Blender lets you fall asleep peacefully in your image editor of choice, rather than having to learn a third or fourth UI before getting around to art.

I can see where this leads and how it could be useful. Unfortunately it is not working at all. The image is transported to GIMP and back to Blender but Blender 2.5 applies a 50% gray triangle underneath the painted image. Especially trying to paint multiple times darkens the previous paints so it turns into an ugly mess. This functionality is therefore totally unusable in practice although interesting on paper.

Yeah, create a new layer and paint on that, turn off the original projection and flatten it then save it out.

As a side note, I found an awesome trick for it. Got a hard-to paint region that's hidden under a craggly character? Put an extreme smooth modifier (or two!) on it, and you're essentially painting on a big ball. Thus, texture seams are super-easy to see and you don't have to worry about the occlusion falloff hitting the wrong area.

Figured it out. Using "Solid View" with "Texture Solid Faces" enabled causes this problem. Using "Textured View" alone works. Blender should write "Textured View" even if you are in "Solid View" with "Texture Solid Faces" enabled to avoid this problem.

EDIT: Nevertheless a proper paint tool using stamp like projection painting would speed up the process of drawing height maps for Detail Normal Maps a great deal. Going back and forth with GIMP using 4096 textures is not the fastest way to do this. With a proper tool Blender would really get an edge.

I for one do not feel that projection painting (as implemented in 2.5) is the answer. A nice unified and complete 3D paint toolset would be most welcome. Things like paint layers, paint channels, etc. All integrated from within the paint editor.

When Blender gets an image editing set that mimics the robustness of pixel-explicit programs, while at the same time allowing me to directly mirror said program's considerable hotkeys (ala the "load Maya hotkeys" setup), people will stop trying to get into Photoshop and GIMP ASAP.

Until then, Blender's better off focusing on being a 3d program first and a 2d program second.

actually with a combination of the compositor, the addition of layers, and expanding the capabilities of the brush system we should be able to be fully competitive with most paint apps. Indeed going a bit beyond that and integrating brush lib from mypaint, and the brush library from krita, and GEGL as the image buffer back end we could have perhaps a paint system second only to Photoshop.

Figured it out. Using "Solid View" with "Texture Solid Faces" enabled causes this problem. Using "Textured View" alone works. Blender should write "Textured View" even if you are in "Solid View" with "Texture Solid Faces" enabled to avoid this problem.

EDIT: Nevertheless a proper paint tool using stamp like projection painting would speed up the process of drawing height maps for Detail Normal Maps a great deal. Going back and forth with GIMP using 4096 textures is not the fastest way to do this. With a proper tool Blender would really get an edge.

One more example of a huge job that we'll have to make on the "after 2.6 is ready": bring together and classify a good enough documentation!!!!!! And it won't be that easy!!!